If you fired up the web version of the Play Store today and everything felt a little off, don't panic. Google just decided to apply its Roboto font to all text on the site. Stock Android users will already be familiar with the typeface as the default setting for all written words on their Nexus devices. Outside of that family, though, it may be relatively unknown. Which is a shame, because it's beautiful.

The new...

...and the old.

That being said, in times past Roboto has not shown itself to be terribly versatile in scaling down to relatively low-ppi displays such as computer monitors and in this case it seems to work alright for headings, though to my eyes, some of the smaller text gets a little messy. For reference, I'm using a monitor with roughly 90ppi, which is ridiculously far below what we are used to on smartphones and tablets. Your mileage may vary, of course.

ah! "'*{font-family: "Arial", sans-serif !important;}';" and we are back to normal... no, i don't have retina display or something else with high dpi so all those cleartype blurry fonts just look terrible...

I think this change greatly improves the user experience of reading the dark-red-on-dark-gray SOLD OUT text whenever I check to see if Google have managed to create some more plastic bumpers in the last goddamn two monthsfhljdhfjkhfmnthfhadhkjhlkjhdf. Sigh. :)

I hate to be that guy, and love AP, but it's part two that's on his recommendation and we are taking about part 1. And to be fair I actually tried to read the first book, but lost interest before anything happened.

Actually, there are three parts. The original book began as a Twilight fan fiction, but as it began to gain a level of popularity, the author retooled it to use original characters and expanded on the-

got the lg optimus g last week and discovered this great font... one of the best things about this phone is the ability to select a font for the device.. really makes it personalized. using hypurewhite right now

If you don't have the font installed on the device you are using to view the page, it will use a default font instead, hence the code ""Roboto" Arial, sans-serif" it will default to Arial. I think this is mostly for those viewing it on there tablets or android devices if they don't want to access it via the App

Agreed, it's barely noticeable with a 15" macbook pro (non-retina), but it's definitely there. The issue comes from Roboto's particular TrueType hinting and how it plays with the font rendering on the browser. Most browsers don't use the operating system's font rendering, opting to do it in their own renderer. Chrome is notorious for bad TrueType rendering and anti-aliasing that requires weird tricks and fixes to make it look better.

In Opera, Roboto looks even worse. In Safari, it depends on the font size, some sizes look far better than Chrome's rendering, other sizes look really jagged. I'd pull it up on my Windows laptop, but the ppi is too high to see most of the flaws.

We might be too use to AA fonts, these newer fonts might look like crap with AA turned on. For me though it looks jagged, not exactly an eyesore but its not as easy to read as the previous font without increasing the size

Robert Alex Kibler

It definitely looks bad on my 23" 1080p monitor. I would love to have a higher PPI monitor, but monitor tech isn't really improving at all.

NicholasMicallef

Same here, it's like it was written using minecraft. It's so bad I doubt even 2560 x 1600 monitors have a high enough density, especially considering most of them are 27"+.

Hugo Pinto

Looks great on my 27" 2560x1440 screen at home and on my dual 24" 1080p screens at work

hoosiercub88

It's not about density or resolution, It's about how the OS or browser renders the font. sheesh people. It looks likes crud on my 1920x1080 27" if I zoom into 150% or so though, it looks crisp and clean.

Wael Omar

The new font have a problem with Arabian letters, it shows (!) instead of spaces.. all apps and descriptions in Arabic are affected :(

I wish i could withdraw my vote and change it to horrible.. looks absolutely AWFUL on my monitor.. =(

MrWicket

30" 2560x1600 and it looks great. only place I see it look off is the bold titles, almost not enough kerning for readability when quickly glancing around. Otherwise I like the unification of the "brand".

That is horrible! Gonna have to build me a Stylish script because I don't think I'll get used to that ugly a** font.

dad

It looks like I have the wrong resolution as well.. I cant read as clear as before. The letters are closer together if you know what I want to say. I guess this is really made for higher density displays..

Text looks great in Firefox. The app page banner image is messed up. Not sure if AdBlock or another add-on messing with it.

Josh Legoza

Ah, that possibly explains why when I went to the Play Store this morning, none of the capital F's had their bottom horizontal line. I'm not a font geek, so that could have nothing to do with it, but I did notice that issue before I saw this article. Didn't notice that it was roboto though.

Firefox has a great Font option to have one uniform font across all websites but Chrome doesn't have one. They need to fix TrueType rendering.

mauric

Well, finally, after all those years, there is something that Internet explorer does better than Chrome.

Chris

display a less then a year old font on a browser thats roughly ten years older then Chrome?

Chris

Still need a way to delete devices. It still shows my original EVO and jetstream tablet, both I no logner have.

Sootie

No idea how by I managed to delete my device. And I cant get the bloody thing back

Chris

You might have hidden it from the device list, but its still there. Just need to click on the gear icon and my orders and settings and then click on settings tab

Cody Lusk

Can't tell a difference. Looks clean and smooth in my Chrome.

Rob

Maybe someday they'll get around to adding a link to the App Wishlist on the website. Unless I'm missing something I only seem to have access via my phone & tablet.

Jared Wiltshire

Umm no one will be able to see the Play store with the Roboto font unless you have installed it.. Its not installed by default (on Windows, and I'm guessing not OSX/Ubuntu either). So yes its going to look the same for 99% of users. Not sure why Google did this.

Completely wrong. HTML5 / CSS3 supports a thing called Web Fonts, which allows the browser to download a font just like an image. This is actually pretty common and it's supported by all modern browsers.

I'm not going to fish through all of the dynamically loaded javascript to find the line that loads it, but here's a few screenshots for demonstration. My system didn't have Roboto installed until about 5 minutes ago, I took a screenshot of a part of the page prior to installing it (shot 4). Then a screenshot after installing and restarting the system (shot 3), you'll see they are identical. Then I loaded the font app, typed in 'Beautiful Widgets', and compared Arial, the fallback font, and Roboto (shots 1 and 2). After removing Roboto again, it still matches.

I also took a moment to force the page to Arial, just to confirm. I'm tempted to stick with it, the character spacing is better on my screen (I hate the 'i' touching the 'f', seen in the screen shots).

Edit: reversed the screenshot numbers, for some reason they post in opposite order.

Jared Wiltshire

Well I dunno but it definitely isn’t loading on my Ubuntu home PC with Firefox 17 or on my work Windows PC with the latest Firefox (18?)

The font looks great to me, but some of that might be Linux's font rendering system. I constantly have issues with "fat" fonts on my Mac at work, and Windows always needs ClearType tweaked. Note; I think I recognize Windows font hinting in your images, have you run through the font smoothing wizard?

Karthik Kumar

Roboto is great for phones, but sadly doesn't work for me on the web. Everything just seems like it came out of a metal compactor.

numpty

Don't see any difference on the Irish store… maybe US only for now?

Simon Belmont

I'll be 100% honest. I didn't even notice the change until AP pointed it out to me.

Now what has been seen cannot be unseen. But it looks pretty good, though bold and small text looks a bit, uh, weird.

Phil Cade Huie

Ever since they changed it, I have been desperately trying to find a way to make the Google Play app store text readaable on my Samsun Galaxy S2 android phone. The new font is so thin and faint (pale gray) that I can't read it. I can't find a way to make it bolder, and I can 't find a way to enlarge the screen. I'm 60 years old and I also have low vision, and I think it's a crying shame that Google couldn't take into consideratin that some of their users might be senior citizens or have less than perfect eyesight. I've asked Google for help twice and have heard NOTHING back from them.l Any suggestions, anyone?

Aleem Qureshi

If you are using chrome on windows, the new playstore looks absolutely horrid, fire it back up on firefox it looks beautiful. the chrome team really need to fix the anti-aliasing and font rendering in chrome